The hanging lanterns of a historic Chinatown. The Golden Gate Bridge. Victorian homes famous for their sherbet hues.
The fan entrance to Levi’s Stadium, which will host the Super Bowl on Sunday, has for days been plastered with these iconic images.
Of a city 45 miles away.
The stadium is actually in Santa Clara, a mostly landlocked suburb of 133,000 people best known as the home of major tech companies, including Nvidia and Intel. But much of the marketing and fan events for the big game have celebrated San Francisco, the picturesque anchor of the Bay Area that draws outsize political attention and the bulk of the region’s tourists.
Santa Clara residents seem largely accustomed to being the forgotten little sibling, regularly overshadowed not just by San Francisco but also by neighboring San Jose, the most populous city in Northern California, and by the broader Silicon Valley. After all, the team that plays in Levi’s Stadium is known as the San Francisco 49ers.
“You hear about all these events going on down in San Francisco, in San Jose — every place but Santa Clara, where they’re going to have the game,” said Gary Morihata, 78, who lives across the street from the stadium.
Santa Clara is one of the oldest cities in California, founded in 1777 with a Spanish mission that was built just a year after the one in San Francisco. The city is also home to Santa Clara University, established in 1851, one of the oldest colleges on the West Coast and the alma mater of Gov. Gavin Newsom.
It was long known for its bounty of prunes, apricots and other fruit through the middle of the 20th century, when the Santa Clara Valley was known as the Valley of Heart’s Delight.
And it was once appealing for being more affordable than the rest of the Bay Area. But then the region transformed into Silicon Valley, drawing increasingly wealthy workers who wanted short commutes to the nearby campuses of tech companies, including Intel, Google and Apple.
Today, it is a city of gray office buildings and well-maintained parks planted with redwoods. Surrounded by San Jose, Sunnyvale and Cupertino, it’s a place where small, one-story homes now sell for well over $1 million.
“Santa Clara never really built its identity in being interesting to outsiders,” said Bob Staedler, a local business consultant. “It’s always been kind of quietly, behind-the-scenes, a great place to live, really well-run.”
Despite the love showered on San Francisco, locals still feel pride that their city is hosting the nation’s biggest sporting event — for the second time. The Super Bowl first came to Santa Clara in 2016, two years after Levi’s Stadium was built there to be a home for the San Francisco 49ers.
John Park, a family medicine doctor who lives in Santa Clara and grew up in the Boston area, wore a Patriots jersey as he worked on a laptop this week at a Starbucks surrounded by tech workers taking virtual meetings.
Mr. Park, 36, said he had worked extra shifts to buy a ticket to Sunday’s game, which will be a 40-minute walk from his house — that beats sitting in traffic and a parking lot.
“It kind of feels surreal,” Mr. Park said. “It’s really a dream come true.”
Glenn Polini, 65, used to hunt doves and pheasants where Levi’s Stadium now stands. Mr. Polini, a retired contractor who has lived in Santa Clara his entire life, said the home he bought decades ago for $300,000 is now worth more than $2 million.
“Everything is expensive here, and thanks to Silicon Valley, that’s the way it is,” he said. “Today, we’d never been able to buy our house.”
The 49ers had played in San Francisco for most of the team’s existence, dating to the early days in Kezar Stadium in Golden Gate Park before the team moved into Candlestick Park along the bay. But Candlestick, with its swirling winds and aging structure that lacked modern luxury suites, was deemed unfit for a team playing in today’s N.F.L.
The 49ers had wanted a new stadium for years but failed to reach an agreement to build what they wanted in San Francisco. The organization instead struck a deal with the city of Santa Clara, where it already had its headquarters and practice facilities.
Though the team has been playing in Santa Clara since 2014, national broadcasts routinely show footage of the Bay Bridge, Alcatraz Island or tourists riding cable cars in San Francisco to give viewers a sense of place. Even the San Jose-based TV station shows images of San Francisco, Mr. Staedler said.
Even if that place is at least an hour drive from the actual stadium.
“I know you’ve got decades of B-roll of Lombard Street and showing the Ferry Building and the views at sunset,” said Mr. Staedler, who has lobbied TV stations to show more images of the South Bay. “It’s stunning, but it’s just like, come on.”
It isn’t just about the marketing. While the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks are practicing in Santa Clara, the N.F.L. made San Francisco the center of its festivities this week. Many fans, media, celebrities and VIPs are staying at hotels there and waiting until Sunday to trek down to the game.
It was the same in 2016. A study commissioned by the Super Bowl 50 host committee found that the game had a $240 million economic impact on the Bay Area, with more than 57 percent of the revenues benefiting San Francisco. San Jose saw 12.3 percent of the economic pie.
Santa Clara got a mere 7.2 percent. The rest went to Oakland and areas around the Bay Area.
Sudhanshu Jain, a city councilman in Santa Clara, known as Suds, said he believed there were primarily two reasons for the lack of festivities this week in Santa Clara: The 49ers now have a strained relationship with the city over their stadium contract, including years of court battles. And the City Council decided not to have any of its own events because its police force was already overwhelmed trying to provide security for the game and all of the people who are staying in area hotels, he said.
Mr. Jain, a tech worker who has lived in the city for 27 years, opposed the stadium’s construction because he worried about how a small city could manage such a large venue.
“Some people think everyone in the world should know Santa Clara’s name,” he said. “I’m not of that persuasion. I don’t see that we have to be that well-known.”
On a recent morning, Evelyn Burch, 43, wore a red 49ers shirt when she stopped to pick up doughnuts for a Super Bowl potluck at her office, where she works as an executive assistant. Though she grew up in the South Bay, she had to move two years ago to Gilroy, Calif., nearly 40 miles south, because the cost of living was far too high, she said.
She felt proud that the Super Bowl was coming to the town she missed so much. She had only one grievance.
“I just wish the Niners were coming,” she said.
Soumya Karlamangla is a Times reporter who covers California. She is based in the Bay Area.
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